Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 12:26:04 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) Silk-23 skidooby

Rostrum quoted me and wrote:
>> Anyway.  My position has been that Silk-43 brain-data was erased from the
>> 43-year-old Silk body; Horn brain-data was downloaded via the Neighbors
>> (by-passing the whole monitor mechanism); later on, Silk-23 brain-data was
>> transferred from Pig to Horn-in-Silk via the eye and the monitor.
>
>Interesting theory - and kind of sinister - instead of Silk conquering Pas
>in Mainframe, Pas is secretly still around pulling all the strings.
>
>But the Narrator can't be a complete reboot back to the Silk-23 back-up
>data, because he still knows and is trying to avoid facing the fact that
>Hyacinth is dead.
>
>"I could not look upon Hyacinth, dead." - isn't that a line from a famous
>poem (with someone else's name in for Hyacinth)?

Well, since in this reading I take it as Horn alone who sees Hyacinth dead
(Silk-43 being completely gone), it is Horn who sees her.  Silk-23 comes
later, via the eye transfer; and Silk-23 would be even more shocked and
distraught over the memory (I'm assuming that Horn and Silk-23 can access
the memories of Horn) than Horn, who was the actual witness.

Adding to the confusion is the question of who the Narrator is when he is
actually writing the words of a given book.  (Percentage-wise, for example.)

But back to the idea of erasing the 20 years of failure. FWIW, it is a
messier "nuts & bolts" version of (a reading of) Severian's "I am not the
first Severian" deal, where Severian is clearly the optimized product and
we don't see the un-edited Severian.  It is also similar, in the literary
world, to that Borges story where young Borges goes into the hotel where
old Borges is committing suicide.  In the comic world, it has some
similarity to how in the "Adam Warlock" series, the depressed Adam Warlock
of the future (all friends died; betrayal and ruin) commits suicide by
folding himself back into his younger self in an attempt to avert that fork
in the life-path that led to such a dead end.

=mantis=



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